Commerce and affairs are increasingly being transacted over the Internet. That is, enterprises and individual users now have sufficient infrastructure and software services to conduct secure and insecure transactions.
One downside to this environment is that a single user often needs to have a plethora of identities for the variety of services and resources that the user consumes over the Internet. This can become a challenging and daunting situation and may often result in the user consuming less resources when that user forgets or mismanages his/her identities.
To solve this problem, a variety of single sign-on services have been offered to users over the Internet. Essentially, a user can sign-on to such a service and then access all the other services associated with the user; assuming those other services are registered with the single sign-on service. In this manner, the user does not have to manage each available service, which the user may need to supply credentials to for purposes of gaining access.
However, these single sign-on services still do not ensure user security when an intruder intercepts or acquires a particular credential of the user for a particular service. So, the user can still be exposed with each individual service being managed by a single sign-on service. Moreover, if an intruder gains the credentials necessary to access the single sign-on service, then every service of the user is exposed and vulnerable. This latter situation can be devastating to a user.
It is also worth noting that some user identities are associated with enterprises for which they work or are otherwise employed. Such users may also have access to services and resources, which if acquired by competitors or criminals could be extremely harmful to their enterprises.
Therefore, it is advantageous to provide techniques for regularly validating identities.